Brazil — Santa Isabel
So here’s a first for 2%Jazz — well, a couple of firsts actually!
We have a blog! It’s this one!
We have a new way we purchase single origin coffee, and…
We have new single origin coffee!
Anyone who knows 2%Jazz knows the name is synonimous with great people and damn good coffee. $2 Americano, anyone? Yeah, that’s us. That price is never going anywhere and we like it that way. Owner Sam Jones’ espresso is distinctive and easy to pick out. It sits somewhere between the current roasting trend of light n’ bright and the classic second wavey dark roast. We call it medium dark, but the reality is that we just roast it until it does what we like and serve that to the general public. It’s all about being confident in our product and being able to stand behind it.
Which brings us to the other point — the single origin program.
The single origin program isn’t new, but certainly our approach to it is. Tristan (the GM) is rabidly passionate about good coffee and good people and had been buying green coffee for other roasters in different capacities before moving to Victoria in 2012. Five years later and Tristan’s experience is guiding how and what we buy for the single origin line-up. So how does Tristan decide what green to buy? Here’s a bit of a breakdown.
He tastes a bunch of different coffees
He examines the relationships between the broker and producer, as well as relationships the broker has made within the local industry.
He works almost exclusively with small shops (Less overhead, more customer focussed).
He makes the call, secures the coffee and brings it in the shop.
This methodology isn’t different, but it’s certainly a departure from the ‘way things were’ at 2%Jazz for a while — with no clear focus, the single origin line became a side note, another bag to pick up and put down while you search the shelves for Hudson or Espresso. He’s hoping to change that.
With that in mind, here’s the first major offering from the new and improved Single Origin line at 2%Jazz: Brazil Heliodora Santa Isabel (or just Santa Isabel for short).
There’s a lot of great things about this coffee besides its cup characteristics, which we’ll get to (they are also great!). We can talk about all sorts of stuff to do with this one.
The Broker: Mountain Coffee in Delta, a quick hop over the water, are the guys that brought us the coffee. Lionel and his crew are up for a BC Small Business Excellence award, just to give you an idea of the sort of organizations we want to deal with. They deserve it, too: The crew took a lot of care in selecting the samples we went through, fifteen different samples from all over Brazil, in some cases microlots and rare finds. Their process is very transparent and extremely equitable, and we’re going to be happy to keep working with them in the future.
The Coffee: Oh, the coffee. For one, it’s extremely traceable. All we had to do was get online and enter a barcode that gave me pictures of the farm, the municipality, even the growers! This is all made possible through the ‘Mantiqueira de Minas’ (look it up, super interesting) mark. In much the same way as VQA wines, coffee in many parts of the world is supported by geographic trademarks that guarantee a certain quality. The Mantiqueira de Minas trademark takes itself seriously, only allowing coffee scoring 83 points (that’s pretty good) on the SCAA cupping scale. They have a wide range of other hoops to jump through, and if you’re at all interested go and have a look at their really flashy website. One of the things we discovered was that not only is this coffee from just the one farm (Santa Isabel), that farm only produced 7 bags (7 x 135lbs) of coffee in the last crop… and we bought 40% of it.
Cup Characteristics: This is the best part. This is 100% Red Catuai coffee, it’s processed and dried extremely well… you can really see it in the green coffee. Everything is vaccuum packed and nitro flushed, very well taken care of — and it shows when it roasts. Very even, almost no tipping (although Marianne would say that’s on her and not the coffee) and ready to drink straight out of the roaster, although a giving this coffee a couple days to breathe has yielded wonderful results. Jasmine on the nose, and not a little jasmine that you have to work for, this is very floral and easy to find. The cup itself is warm and soft, a sort of pleasant rustic papery quality that always betrays a coffee Brazillian origin. Lower acid than was expected from a natural coffee, but lots and lots of residual sugars — sugarcane, peanuts and a rich quality round out the cup. It’s been a real pleasure to bring this coffee into the cafe, and we hope into your homes.
